The Year of the Snake Begins

“Your beliefs become your thoughts,

Your thoughts become your words,

Words become your actions,

Your actions become your habits,

Your habits become your values,

And your values become your destiny.”

~ Ghandi

With the start of the new year there are new goals, and some returning goals.

Returning goals

Since some of my goals from last year were not completed, they will be worked on again this year. They are, the continuation of the decluttering of my life and the Greatcoat project.

The decluttering still has a long way to go but I think I will start this year with more focus on the digital decluttering than the physical decluttering, at least for the beginning of the year. It is too easy to let digital clutter pile up because you can’t physically see it but it is definitely impacting my life. I feel that the digital stuff (email, direct messaging, message boards, social media, etc.) should be serving me and not the other way around, but it’s gotten out of hand and a lot of it needs to go. What says mediocrity more than allowing yourself to get caught up in scrolling through social media and useless videos, wasting countless precious hours of one’s limited lifespan? Why have I got so many emails coming from various businesses that I don’t even read? No, I don’t want to subscribe to your [random business’] newsletter! No, I don’t need to waste countless hours playing word and number games to “improve my brain age”, nor other games on my phone either! No, I don’t believe that you have an honest job offer for me random person I don’t know!

Delete, delete, unsubscribe, uninstall, block…

The Greatcoat will remain a project that gets done when it’s not growing season. Hopefully another project won’t insinuate itself into its place this time. However, there are some things you cannot put off no matter how much you may want to and that’s what happened last year. Unfortunately, that insinuating project is still ongoing even though it was supposed to be completed the end of last November. Things don’t always go as planned. It is very close to being done and booted out of my life forever.

For those who might be curious, a Greatcoat is a type of coat. There are many types of coats including: frock coat, morning coat, tailcoat, overcoat, etc. A Greatcoat is most noticeably recognized by Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts, as he is often depicted as wearing one. They are a heavy warm wool coat that was also often used by Military and Navy. The person this coat is for has often told me how much he misses the one that he had in the Navy.

New goals

My forms for this year are stick/staff and Lau Gar. There is another weapon I would like to try but this year is to experiment and see if it will be viable for next year’s weapon. We’ll see.

Focus on flexibility. I plan to be more mindful of working on my flexibility, and the strength to go with it. I could really use some helpful input on this because I don’t have a lot of knowledge in this area (some but could use more). I would like to get closer to:

• doing the splits in both directions – and the muscle strength to hold each leg higher in the air while standing.

• forward bends where I can touch my chest to my knees

• deeper back stances – my ankle flexibility has now gotten to the point that it’s my muscle’s ability to hold me up more than my ankles preventing the depth

• more flexible spine – trying to improve my cobra pose here

Anyone have any other suggestions for this goal?

The big goal

And finally, a really big goal for me this year. As many of you know I seized the opportunity to declutter my career. For reasons I won’t get into it has been a huge relief! There were stresses from it that I had no idea I was experiencing nor how it was really impacting my life. As a result, this has given me the opportunity to try something I’ve always wanted to, ever since I was a child: pursue art seriously as a potential career.

Many years ago, I had the privilege of doing calligraphy for a few movies and a TV show. While I had done art as a hobby (particularly calligraphy and illumination) and made a little extra cash at it before, nothing compared to what it was like working for the movie industry. I loved it! However, we moved to Alberta at a time when the industry wasn’t yet comfortable with remote workers and the internet. We discussed using couriers, but it just didn’t work out, and the jobs fizzled out.

So, this year my goal is to do art like it’s my actual job! I have hired a mentor who is a creature designer for the film and game industry to help me for a month every quarter. I also have tutorials from another creature designer that used to work for Disney. I plan to do Inktober, the 100 head challenge, and one other art challenge that has yet to be chosen (any ideas?). The plan is to at least draw five days a week. Will I be able to work in the field? Who knows? The answer will always be “no” if I don’t even try.

Numbers:

Pushups: 146

Situps: 97

Weapon Form: 15

Hand Form: 8

Random Acts of Kindness: 8

Sparring: 0

Kilometres: 14

Memorize “Mastery”: Nothing to report

Nurture Relationships: Nothing to report

Blogging: 1

Declutter my life: No progress since last blog

Greatcoat project: No progress since last blog

Improved flexibility: 1 (one day of mindfully working on this)

Art: 4 days of drawing so far